…They put all of this different, circumstantial evidence together, and they said, ‘Well, if Jason Jones looks like a spy, if this guy gives different names to people, then he must be a spy.’ It was so emblematic of this paranoid thinking that they had that it didn’t even allow them to listen to the laugh track on The Daily Show. So they said, ‘Well, why did you talk to this spy? If he says that he’s a spy, if he looks like a spy, then he must be a spy.’ And they were really upset that I said, ‘Iran and the United States had a lot in common.'”

Humor survives in the bleakest of conditions. … I think the idea that under these incredibly harsh conditions, not only did [Bahari’s] humor survive, his humor sustained him. And I found that incredibly empowering. … I’ve always had this experience at funerals or in a time of great worry [that] a joke can kind of re-energize or reconfigure a room or bring people back to life to some extent. [Bahari’s] ability to do that for himself in the absence of audience I thought was remarkable.

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